Jamrach's Menagerie

by Carol Birch

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tim, ‘home sweet home. You still scared?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘S’all right,’ he said. ‘Here, give us your hand.’

  I held mine out and he took it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘when I go home I’ll be the man of the family.’

  After that there was no more talking. I thought about Ishbel and her mother in that house together, and wondered how they were managing. She’d hate it. Her mother drove her mad. I suppose they wouldn’t miss the old man so much, those mermaids never brought in much, but they’d be glad when Tim was back. I could see her, sitting by the fire gnawing moodily at her terrible nails. What was she doing? Someone would have her, good-looking girl like that. Out she’d be, with some beau, some sailor. I wouldn’t think about it.

  Tim’s hand slid out of mine when he fell asleep. As for me, I got not a wink till the seventh bell and by that time it was hardly worth it.

  We rowed in through house-high rocks covered in barbarous plants like halted green explosions. A river ran down from a high forested ravine, skirting one edge of a sheltered beach, horseshoe-shaped, fringed with creamy-blossomed trees and split about the other edge by a long spur of dark pink rock. Beyond, upland and inland, tier on tier, slender shock-headed palms leaned elegantly one way, as if about to pull themselves up from the earth and set off on some sweeping migration. On either side of the bay, tall crags rose up.

  There we were wandering about on the beach like great fools, waiting with sticks against the dragon. The sand was damp and flat and rippled, scattered with rocks here and there, and the sky was grey and cold looking, but I was running with sweat. The heat seemed to come from within as well as without, as if my organs were slowly cooking in the oven of my flesh. Out in the bay were three or four islands, rounded tumps of shaggy green. The cage was placed at the narrowest part of the beach. If ever a place was dragonish, this was. The arms of the bay sprawled out to sea, long reptilian forms lying half submerged, dark grey, black, elongated piglike snouts ready to snap. The scaly muddy-pink spur that Dan said was a lava flow down the beach could have been the long claw of a giant foot. Here and there the rock looked pulpy and squelchy, as if a giant had been playing with clay. Everywhere you looked there were faces in it. And the tracks were plain, over by the river, one single trail of eerie hand-like tracks, clawed. The size of big dinner plates.

  A peculiar red-spotted crab scuttled by my foot. Felix was collecting big white curly shells and stacking them up by the boats. Next to the cage, Martin and Abel and Dag were splitting wood, making stakes. Waves, white-tipped, came coursing in. The edges of the beach where it joined the forest were strewn with fallen debris. I wandered about looking at things with my telescope, red and blue birds in the trees, the rocks at sea, the ravine, till I strayed too close to the trees and was suddenly scared, looking into the pale, fluttering green within. The trunks of the trees were silver streaks. The silent echo of something infinitely denser and darker brooded deeper in, a hollow howling like a throat.

  I heard voices.

  The hunting party had only been gone a couple of hours and here they were coming back already.

  Everything about this landing was different from the others. They were excited, there was something in their faces. There were more tracks, they said, on higher ground. Need more stakes, more rope. A lot of rope. The plan was changed. We’d stay here a day or two, set up rough camp on the beach. ‘We four,’ Dan said, ‘we’ll trap it on the high ground and bring it down. But we need more manpower. Three more.’ He looked at me and smiled kindly. ‘Now’s your chance, Jaf, if you still want it.’

  ‘I do,’ I said, and that was when the voice that watched in my head piped up: You’re mad, you’re mad, you don’t have to go. You never had to go. Stay here, you fool. Play faro with Billy Stock on deck. No one cares whether you go or not.

  ‘Go on, Jaf,’ Tim said, ‘it’s a great thing being out there. You’ve got to come.’ He touched my arm. ‘Come with us, Jaf,’ he said, and his eyes were almost pleading with me to go and keep him company.

  I laughed. ‘You try and stop me,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’ Dan clapped his hands. ‘So – who else is for it?’

  ‘Me,’ said John Copper, ‘me.’

  And Dag Aarnasson.

  *

  A massive millipede rippled across our path, a vile red thing like a nerve. The trees were full of bright birds.

  Anything might be poisonous in a place like this. They might drop on you from above, scrabbling down your neck. Scorpions. Spiders with teeth. Who knows what’s up there? We walked silently, single file, with the Malays going ahead and Dan in the rear. I was glad of him back there, glad of how unconcerned he seemed, gladder still when we came out above the forest onto a grassy, rocky place with scarcely a tree. But then I began to think about snakes in the long grass, and my fingers kept carressing the handle of the shooter slung against my hip. What good would that be against a snake? You wouldn’t see it till it was too late.

  Dan called a halt. He said we should go east. He said he was going to rope the dragon. He said there was no longer any doubt that it was there, and we were going to take one alive. It sounded ridiculous. Rope a dragon? John laughed nervously. Dag’s face was a weird flat jutty thing with staring blue eyes. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said in that slow heavy way of his.

  ‘Ach,’ said Dan, ‘don’t worry about it. Me and these boys here will see to all that. You just keep back and do as you’re told, and we’ll all be fine. You come in at the end with the rest of the rope when it’s safe, and help us get it on the hurdle.’

  ‘What hurdle?’ I asked.

  ‘The one we haven’t made yet,’ he said. ‘One thing at a time. First we find a place to lay the bait.’

  ‘What bait?’

  ‘You, Jaf,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Why do you think I brought you along?’ He laughed and pushed my head. ‘We don’t have the bait yet either. One thing at a time. First find the place, then kill the bait.’

  We walked for the rest of that day up and down rolling swells of savannah, along animal tracks, well used by who knows what. Dag and I walked side by side. Donkeys, I thought, that’s us. Native bearers. All right for him, the size of him like an ox, but it was hell for me. Sweat ran into my eyes. My shoulders burned from the weight of my pack, and the stakes I carried rubbed them raw. Dan and Tim and the Malays were less heavily burdened, them being protectors and great hunters, weapon-bearers, trackers. Tim looked back and laughed at us, me so small and dark and Dag so big and fair. I never really knew Dag before this. He was about twenty, a quiet man with a gentle, watchful air, and as he was easy-going, he made a good travelling companion.

  ‘Is it cold where you come from?’ I asked him as the heat cooked me.

  He grinned. ‘Very cold in winter. Snow to here.’ He motioned above his head.

  I whistled. ‘How do you bear the heat?’

  ‘At first,’ he said, adjusting the coil of rope upon his shoulder, ‘it was difficult. But I …’ – he made impatient winding motions with his finger and I saw that his nails were seriously bitten, almost as bad as Ishbel’s – ‘I … I got used to it.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have gone north,’ I said, wiping sweat from my brow with my filthy palm. ‘To the ice. See polar bears. Eskimos.’

  He smiled. ‘We want what we don’t have. I could not wait to see the palm trees. I saw pictures in my father’s books.’ His smile was big and completely semi-circular, brightening his large square face. It seemed to me exotic that a father should have books. I got a picture in my head of a gent in a black suit of clothes like a country vicar.

  ‘Your father had books?’

  ‘About the places he’s been. He was a sailor too. And my brothers. I have three.’

  Dan turned and glared at us. He was going on ahead now with the Malays, and John and Tim were bringing up the rear. We shut up and plodded on.

  ‘Do you have Eskimos where you live?’ I aske
d an hour later. I would have said it was late afternoon, but it was hard to tell from the sky, which was still sullen though the rain had not materialised.

  ‘Not where I live,’ he replied. ‘They live in Greenland. And Canada. And other places. No, we have the Lapps.’

  ‘What are the Lapps like?’

  ‘They are northern people,’ he said. ‘They keep reindeer.’

  It was funny walking along in that hot place talking about the far north. How beautiful those icy regions seemed to me. I imagined the deck of a ship all briny with frost, ice sharp as an arrow, tincture of emerald, tincture of blue. A frozen ocean, magnificently still and serene.

  Ahead, the Malay with the tattoo held up his hand and everyone froze.

  How long we did not move I don’t know. Everything became very clear, every blade of grass. When I swallowed, my throat creaked. Dan motioned us cautiously forward with his hand without even looking back. We crept. And when we were gathered—

  Sudden, so my heart jumped up like a man started from sleep by a bell – bolt upright, stab! – then the hammering as of a demented woodpecker … a deer, leaping across the path ahead of us. One instant, a graceful prancing arc, and it was gone into the long grass.

  We stood staring and waiting. The silence roared. Then we followed the Malays’ stalking feet, step by wary step, a distance of no more than a few yards before we stopped again, brought up short by a stink like a blocked privy.

  The grass sang.

  Something huge and dark came out of the scrub twenty yards or so ahead of us, running very fast on four bow legs. It plunged into the high savannah in the direction the deer had gone. Time speeded up. We moved forward at a good pace, and all I knew was the high grasses on either side of me whispering at our passage, and the back of Dan’s head, and my shoulders hurting and my breath beginning to scrape a little. A good hour of it till we slowed down and closed ranks again close by the edge of some kind of rocky escarpment. There could be no more talking. We’d come so far now into the island that I’d lost all sense of scale and direction, and had no idea which way the ship was or how far away, no idea whether the rock face to our right was the height of two tall men or as high as a mountain. The quick black shadow had scuttled before my eyes a million times as we walked. How many more of those things were out there, hiding in the heavy brush, watching with hard reptilian eyes? I was never more afraid but never so brightly aware. I felt as if my eyes were wide and over bright, and the others looked the same. Even the Malays, whom I’d considered knowing and unshakeable and well-nigh invulnerable, all but shimmered with an unhinged energy. I’d faced the great whales, but they were known.

  And now a dumb show began. Our blood was up. We were in the wild, and the wild has teeth and claws and eyes and a stink like the rotting of a day-old carcass. I saw only a dark living bulk of great size, four bandy legs running. So fast. Dan and the Malays talked with their hands and shoulders and eyes. I wanted to be Dan. I wanted his gift for roaming the world talking to everyone he met. I wanted his ease in outlandish places and the way he never seemed afraid. I wanted the fear that moved in my belly to transmute into serenity. The smaller of the two Malays spotted blood. Something is leaving a trail. He moved his forearm in such a way, how he did it I don’t know, he made it look like a deer. Palm towards us, keeping us back, he went forward. For a while he stood absolutely motionless looking through the thinning bush, then beckoned us cautiously on.

  We came like ghosts. I saw the deer first, through the high grass. She was far away on the side of a long balding slope, near dead, her blood trail following her faithfully not quite to the shadow of the rock to which she’d dragged herself. She’d collapsed in the dust. A stain of blood widened about her and she was trying, hopelessly but doggedly, to raise her head up sideways. Then I saw the dragon, just above and beyond us, completely still on a low wrinkle of land overlooking the plain, no more than a deck’s length from me. A huge, brownish-grey thing with black head and legs, bigger than a tiger, longer and lower but raising its powerful chest and head as high at the front and trailing behind it a mighty weapon of a tail.

  It was magnificent. Its feet were like giant hands, splayed and slightly inturned, knobbly and wavy and tipped by long black claws that curved like sickles – a kind of a lizard obviously, but like nothing I’d ever seen. We’d had geckos and chameleons and iguanas at Jamrach’s, even a Gila monster once, but they were nothing compared to this. The size of it! That chest, the muscles in those arms, the skin like ancient armour, scaly and notched and scarred like the ears of an old tom cat, yet loose and wrinkled, hanging in baggy swathes under its belly and throat. Its closed mouth was like a crocodile’s, a crooked line that meandered along its lower jaw. A slick tongue darted out and in, forked and yellow.

  It began to sway its head a little, slowly, snakeish, side to side. How long did we watch? Minutes.

  After a while it looked towards us, but not, I think, at us. It had a broad and slab-like face with large nostrils and cold, overhung eyes set very wide on either side of its head. A sour, displeased face. Its jaws opened and I saw crocodile teeth. Then it turned its face away and moved forward, showing none of the speed we had seen before, but walking ponderously as if feeling its weight. Slowly, it slid down the short incline and lumbered on across the broad plane towards the deer, head now low to the ground, snakelike with its darting tongue and questing, forward movement. Its departure caused us to relax, but the Malay tensed every muscle and warned us with one chopped movement to keep still. We watched the dragon amble about in a vague sort of way for several moments. Clearly it was not interested in finishing off the poor deer, not yet. We watched till the creature was no more than a pointed tail disappearing into the scrubland beyond the clearing.

  The Malay turned and motioned that we make a slow and silent retreat, and back we went as we had come till we were once more at the great rock face.

  ‘The size of it, Jesus Christ the size of it,’ John Copper said.

  Dan showed nothing. Just a mysterious smile.

  ‘Why didn’t we go after it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ill prepared,’ said Dan. ‘No hurry. Now we know what we’re up against.’

  He went a small way apart with the Malays for a parley. There was an air of tense celebration, a burst of quick laughter among them.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said John again. ‘Got any blunt on you, Jaf?’

  We four – me and Tim, Dag and John – sat down and lit a couple of pipes.

  ‘That’s it, all right,’ Tim said. ‘Fucking monster.’

  ‘It’s not a dragon,’ I said. ‘It’s like he always said. A big crocodile.’

  ‘Big though.’

  ‘Still, not a monster.’

  ‘I never saw anything like it. It’s like—’

  ‘Ugly, horrible-looking thing. Did you see those claws?’

  ‘And the teeth?’

  ‘Jesus, how we going to—’

  ‘Slow though. Not nifty.’

  ‘Didn’t you see it run? Before? Back on the path. Didn’t you see that?’

  ‘It shifted, all right.’

  ‘It’s only an animal,’ I said.

  ‘What were you expecting? Saint George and some girl tied to a rock? Of course it’s only an animal.’

  ‘It’s just a wild animal. We can catch it. Dan’s caught a tiger, he can catch this.’

  ‘That’s what he does, he brings them back alive.’

  Dan came tramping over and told us we were camping here for the night, and tomorrow we’d move on a little further and find a place to set the trap. Here? With those things roaming about? Come tomorrow all there’d be left of us would be our packs, lying forlornly among our scattered bones. But Dan said, no, here was fine, we’d light a fire and set a watch, and so we did, and it was in fact quite comfy and sweet the way we all sat round that warm glow of a fire in the midst of the dense black wild all about us. Dan passed around a small flask of brandy and we drank and smoked our pipes
, and the Malay with blue tattoos told what sounded like jokes in his own language and made us all laugh even though we didn’t understand a word. It was just his face and the way he talked. And in the end I slept well, waking only when the others were already moving around and the sudden morning light was about to break.

  We ate a little hardtack, packed up and moved on. I thought we would have made the trap soon, but Dan was in no hurry. That fierce-looking beast and everything that happened last night seemed a dream as we plodded on and on, the sun rising higher and higher and hotter and hotter, the clouds clearing above some high ground ahead. In front of us a baldy crag rose up, and water came down the face of a rock, splitting round a jutting spur of jungly growth much further down. We were walking into a lusher part of the island, at least in these low places. Low, I say. I had forgotten how high we’d climbed from the beach. Up here the air was sharp and ripe like a bursting plum. Why didn’t we set the trap? I didn’t like this, walking on into a territory of good cover. As well as the long grass in which any low thing might lurk unseen, we now had a growing shrubbery on our left-hand side, a patchy place of scattered bushy clumps, behind any one of which a dragon might lurk, two dragons, three, who knows, there could be a dozen of the things out there. Why not lay the trap now? Wasn’t one place pretty much as good as another? But no, not so, says Dan, God knows why. What good if we’re all exhausted when we have to face it? So on and on, till we sensed a foulness on the air and came to an edge no one expected and looked over and saw …

  A mess of them like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag trailing festoons, the grinning head of which, half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own. Another watching, a huge thing, solid and impassive as a rock, huge, trunk-like legs planted before it. Yet one more, smaller, flicking its flat forked tongue as it slowly crawled away, full. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten dragons, I don’t know. They were messy feeders, worse than sharks, drooling as they ate, dragging and shaking and ripping, snapping greedily, lifting their great gulping throats to swallow. At some point the big one at the side began swinging its head heavily from side to side, then waded in like a burly bully of a drunk and soon was pigging it with all the rest. Such weary majesty this one had, and so much bigger was it than all the rest, that it very quickly became centre of the scene, with all the others writhing around it respectfully while scarcely touching it. So it was able to eat more or less undisturbed, taking huge bites with wide-open mouth – the size of it, the way its jaws stretched horribly wide, snake-like, the way a shining pink membrane of blood-hued saliva stretched between upper and lower jaw, and more dripped down from between its sharp little razor teeth. It stopped after a while, closed its mouth and raised its head, turning a little sideways in our direction, darting its tongue. We’d taken cover, but I swear it looked at me. Straight at me with a demon bright red grin. Gave me the chills. There are worlds between the animals of Jamrach’s and the animals of the wild, worlds between a croc in an enclosure and a dragon free. I’d been nearer to wild animals thousands of times, but here there were no barriers. This was real fierce beasts in the real wild and nothing between me and them. A cold gush of fear pierced through me, starting somewhere deep in my belly like sickness, and invading all of me, right down to the extremities within a second or two. I thought the monster would come leaping up the cliff face to eat me as it was eating the dragon carcass, which was now scarcely more than a few ribs and some savaged hide. But instead it closed its mouth once more and returned to the last leisurely pickings with an air of boredom.